Wednesday, September 24, 2014

This past week our van died. We
don't usually mourn the loss of vehicles in this home, but I was
strangely moved by memories of the 14 years we owned this one. If we
were hosting a memorial service, I would read the following letter to
our deceased van.

Dear Van,

You left us this week very suddenly,
but I'm glad the end happened quickly. There was a certain mercy to
the finality of your death. I guess warning signs were happening for
a while, but we never noticed your condition until it was too late,
and now you are gone from us.

You have left me feeling quieted and
introspective. Your passing has occasioned the remembrance of past
events and seasons. For fourteen years you were as much a part of our
lives as the home in which we lived. And with a quick signature and
the passing of a few hundred dollars between hands, you now rest with
the dismantler who will oversee your final hours as a single vehicle.

Truth be told, we bought you to use
you. You came nice and clean, whole and sturdy, ready for kids and
trips and packages and gear. But we didn't drive you the way you
expected. Within a few months we sent you to the customizer who
shredded your soul and replaced your ordered interior with a lowered
floor, a wheelchair ramp, and multiple brackets for tie downs and
straps. You must have felt a measure of concern as your original
soccer-mom design was tossed aside and you were transformed into a
work horse. The conversion added excessive weight which you were
never truly built to carry. You looked fat and unappealing, and into
your new cavity of an interior we drove a heavy wheelchair and
treated you more like utility truck than a family car.

The weight did its damage over time.
You were quiet in 2000, mildly noisy in 2008, and an utter
rattle-trap by 2013. The heaviness of your conversion and cargo beat
you into the ground. Every bump was magnified and every broken road
gave you a bruising. I thought the end would come with a transmission
failure, but your life concluded with a piston rod jutting
unceremoniously out of the hole it blew in your oil pan. You died of
a broken heart, I think. You carried our family as long as you could,
then ended your service with a bang and whimper—one of the few
times you ever left us stranded.

Did you know the weight would kill you?
You carried it every day, whether or not the chair was present. We're
all like that. The weight never ceases, even when the chair isn't
around to remind us. It beats us into the ground, even when the bumps
in the road seem small to a typical car. We feel them more deeply,
and they break us down over time.

You never complained when we piled our
gear around the chair and forced you to take the whole family along
with a friend or two (and the cats in their cages) all the way to the
cabin. You ran warmer, perhaps, but you got us there. Then you
gathered the dust of the mountains all over you for two or three
weeks while we tried to give the family a normal vacation. There was
no normal, but we did our best. We had no choice about taking you
down those roads. You were the only way we could get the chair and
its owner away from home and up into the beauty of the woods. You
bore the abuse quietly.

I envy you. You have come finally to a
place of rest. I know, there will be no future glory for you, no
eternity for your soul. You have no immaterial substance to abide
forever. But if you did, here is what I bet you would think as you
enter the season of recycling and rust: it was your honor to carry
the weight. It was your glory to be converted and reassigned for the
thankless task of ferrying burdens for a burdened family. It was
worth it to be driven to death for the sake of priceless cargo.

I will remember these things, dear van,
when I drive past the dismantling yard off highway 65, for you an
industrial grave yard, but for me a reminder that it, too, is my
glory to carry the weight of priceless cargo. It is an honor to bear
the burden of a burdened family, and to be beaten down by the
heaviness of it all. The task is its own reward. I hope I bear it as
steadily as you did for all those years. Greater love has no man than
this: that a man lay down his life for his friends. Or family, in my
case.

Enjoy your rest. Should I die like
you—spent, broken-hearted, beaten down, old and worthless, yet
filled with glorious purpose, my life will have been a wonderful
success.

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About Me

My greatest joy is walking with Jesus. That's also my greatest challenge! I'm weary of this world, but glad to have purpose in it. Right now, we see "through a glass darkly" and I can't wait to be face to face...